


He Was A Person

by Mia Wabbit Lemon (peppersasen)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-07-01
Packaged: 2018-07-19 10:22:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7357423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peppersasen/pseuds/Mia%20Wabbit%20Lemon





	1. No words, no words, no words

“He was a person,” I said. “He was a person, I used to sell a person. My commodity was person.”

“So what’s next, then?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you going to go seek for new clients?” he asked. “What are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know how to.”

“What do you mean you ‘don’t know how’?”

“I mean, I’ve never known how to pitch—is that what you say? You ‘pitch’ them?”

“I don’t know, you’re the magician here, the with the fancy magic tricks.”

“I can’t even remember how it happened… He chose me. Yes, I suppose that’s what happened. He chose me. I didn’t even know what I’d been doing back then.”

No response this time. He grabbed his tea cup, moved it about with circular motions. I waited for him to take a sip, but after seven seconds he never did.

“I was fresh out of school when he found me.” I recalled my earliest memory of him. “He just… offered it to me.”

“Why?” he asked, “Why did he offer it to you, do you think?”

“I don’t know. I was tinkering with my social media accounts. He never understood that sort of thing. Thought he’d be clever and give me sage advice about keeping off of it.”

“He was always a wise arse, wasn’t he?”

“Jah.” I took a quick deep breath, not the kind you take when you need air. The kind you take in to block your airways and hold back tears.

“Where was this?”

“An airport.”

“An airport…”

“We weren’t even boarding the same flight.”

“What kind of wise-arsery did he impart upon you?”

“The keep-off-your-phone-look-around-you kind.” I replied quietly. So typical of him. “He was an old man at heart.”

“He died an even older man.”

“Hah.”

“Hah,” he repeated.

“He used to do that.”

“What?”

“Repeat—repeat after me whenever I’d just left him completely speechless.”


	2. Lies!

I never knew who he was in the end, except for the side that was my creation. I kept to myself, maybe he never knew the real me, either—I’d like to think that I knew myself. Hopefully I did.

His mum, his racist mother, was livid. So was his elder sister. He’d left the house to me. It was mine now. As the lawyer—or ‘solicitor’ as they called them here—handed me the keys after the will-reading, I could just feel their seething blood—blub, blub, blub—like heated airwaves. I was too tired to care, too exhausted to think why the house was mine. I nodded politely to his father and took off.

As I went down the steps of the lawyers’ office along the pavement, I continued my thought—I hadn’t been paying attention to the lawyer as he read the will. Next thing I knew, I heard sounds of protest that began to form words in my ears and two very angry ladies staring daggers at my face. And then I had a handful of keys. Everything he owned was large and his large hands made everything look small. I thought certain ice cream companies produced smaller tiny buckets for their UK market than they do in Asia, but upon closer inspection, he just had large hands… This bunch of keys were a handful.

So with a hand full of keys to an old Victorian house—which was quite possibly haunted, I wandered in the cold and let my mind wander about whether or not I truly knew him. I would never claim him to be my creation because the fact was we were never in a Pygmalion situation.

It’s just that we were different people when we first met, and we didn’t know each other well, along the way we changed bit by bit… until we became the versions we knew to each other in the end. It was hard to say whether I still ‘recognised’ myself when I never was sure of who I was or am.

But also, he slowly became the man I ran a social media presence for. Like a lie you begin to believe in to the point of becoming a reality... By the end of the story, you feel remorseless because you no longer recognise it as a lie. Your brain does not register it as a lie, and as far as you’re concerned, it’s the truth from now on.

And then, by the end, we just knew the versions of each other we knew—in a sort of complacency, a comfortable silence, and never really put much thought into it. It was an unnecessary discussion.


End file.
